Monday, August 01, 2005

Topix was valued at $64M

When Topix.net was acquired back in March, there was some confusion about their valuation.

Bambi Francisco at CBS Marketwatch first said that "the funding was less than $5M" but later reported that the valuation was between $50-100M.

Rafat Ali at PaidContent.org looks up the details in the latest SEC filings and concludes that the three newspapers paid $48-50M for their 75% stake.

Jeff Clavier summarizes that Topix.net was valued at "around $64M" for a company "that closed 2004 with about $1M in revenues".

Topix.net offers a clever service with automated, fine-grained categorization of news articles crawled from sources worldwide. They are particularly strong in local news, with categories even for small cities like Sequim, WA. Topix.net also has some useful experience with targeting advertising to news.